Everyone Wants to Fly to Asia. Not Everyone Can

Chinese travelers want to go abroad again. That much is clear from this month’s lead story. What’s less clear is whether the industry can get them there.

A Dragon Trail survey of 310 Chinese travel agents found demand for outbound trips climbing sharply this year, with summer bookings up too. But flights to Japan are running at less than half of 2019 levels, and Thailand isn’t much better off. Airlines, visa offices, and airports now have the harder job of catching up.

India is chasing its own kind of momentum, from a different direction. Air India has hired a new CEO to steer a turnaround the airline badly needs. Hyatt, for its part, is looking at India not as an add-on market but as one worth building around, with a possible domestic-focused brand and acquisitions in the mix.

China’s hotel and travel sectors, meanwhile, are sorting out what comes after years of turbulence. Trip.com is still absorbing the cost of an antitrust case that forced it to shut down a key tool, with the damage now visible in its earnings. And a wave of hotel investment sweeping the country turns out to be more than picking over distressed assets — investors are finding real value, not just bargains.

Demand, in other words, has returned. What each of these stories is really about is who gets there first.